Earth to Cruise: The Familiar Territory of Oblivion

In Oblivion, a portrait of professional life after the apocalypse, Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, a human pilot in the 2070s who has been given the unenviable task of doing maintenance work on an obliterated Earth. Each day, leaving the cloud-level home where he lives with his wife, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), he jets around the planet, checking on seawater-purification equipment and doing handyman work on malfunctioning robots. Sixty years earlier, we’re told, the Earth was invaded by aliens; the humans won the war, but the planet became uninhabitable. Today, except for Harper and his wife, who report to a floating space station called the Tet, all people live in a diasporic colony on a Saturn moon. There are a few lingering aliens on Earth, called Scavs, and they cause a bit of trouble, but the Tet keeps them in check using drone patrols. Each drone resembles Wall-E, with a gun rack.

Harper is a lover, a dreamer, and a hoarder of tchotchkes. Sometimes, when he tells his wife he’s going on patrol, he actually escapes to a small cabin in a lush, untouched part of Earth, dons a Yankees cap, and admires the pre-apocalyptic trinkets he’s accumulated there: some books, a stuffed animal, a groovy old collection of LPs. He is haunted by faint memories of the past, but cannot place them. One day, resting at his hideaway, he sees a spaceship fall from the sky. After going against the Tet’s advice and investigating, he finds a fallen NASA spacecraft, from before the war. It carries human beings in sleeping pods; drones rapidly arrive and, to his surprise, begin shooting. Harper manages to rescue one of the sleeping people, a familiar-looking astronaut named Julia (Olga Kurylenko), who tells him there is more to his history than he knows. The next day, the two of them are captured by the Scavs, who turn out not to be aliens at all, but a rogue enclave of raggedy humans. Their leader, a sunglasses-wearing officer dressed in black and named Malcolm Beech (Morgan Freeman), tells Harper that he’s actually being governed by an elaborate mind-control system, and that reality is just the opposite of what he thinks. If you believe you’ve seen this movie before, consider returning to Hollywood for your brain cleansing.

Like many films starring Tom Cruise, Oblivion is largely a movie about Tom Cruise, and all the signatures of his screen style have been given occasion to thrive. For more than two hours, we watch Cruise speeding on motorcycles, stunt-diving in planes, rappeling from wires, muscling through intense and face-grabby love scenes, and doing mortal combat using just his hands. (At one point, for various sci-fi reasons, he ends up in fisticuffs with an alternate version of himself—a few moments of Cruise-on-Cruise action that left this viewer feeling in need of a bath.) When Beech launches a plan to reclaim the planet for humans with nukes from the NASA vessel, it is Cruise’s character alone who can set the scheme in action. We find him tight-faced, daring, cocky in the cockpit. This is Top Gun reimagined after the apocalypse.

It’s hard for the movie to escape the long shadow of military allegory, actually. That is not always for the best. In a film already laden with action-flick tropes, resonance of this kind—the movie’s drones hum like a hundred New York Times headlines—only weigh it down: There’s lots of “message” here, but somehow not enough coherent meaning. The director, Joseph Kosinski, best known for Tron (2010), wrote the screenplay based on his own graphic novel, and he channels lots of classic sci-fi, with modifications (the movie’s Death Star–like spacecraft, for instance, suggests a mix of 2001 and Brookstone). Riseborough, a prim, china-eyed actress well-cast for the role, does a respectable job as Harper’s female partner, as does Kurylenko. So it’s a shame these female characters exist mostly as an audience for Cruise’s tiring gymnastics. “In spite of all that’s happened, Earth is still my home,” he tells us. Is it, Tom?